Ten old friends reunite for a birthday after years of drifting in and out of one another’s lives. Drinks are flowing, old jokes are resurfacing, buried resentments are being disguised as banter, and sometime after midnight someone suggests a game they used to play constantly in college: Mafia. It is supposed to be harmless. By the end of the night, six people have been “killed” in the game. By the end of the week, three of them are actually dead. And someone in the group knows that the deaths are not coincidences.

In the kingdom of Alverin, talent is not simply something a person possesses. It is something that can be extracted, traded and borrowed.At the prestigious Institute of Exchange, gifted students temporarily acquire abilities belonging to other people. They can borrow a singer’s voice, a warrior’s courage, a scholar’s intelligence, a thief’s reflexes or even a diplomat’s charm. The Institute claims that every talent is donated willingly and that its students are being trained to use humanity’s gifts for the greater good.Seventeen-year-old Elian Vey has spent his life believing he is completely ordinary. He has no exceptional skill, no powerful family and no natural magical ability. But during his entrance examination, he displays something the Institute has never seen before: he can carry several borrowed talents at once.Suddenly, Elian becomes the school’s most valuable student. He is given private lessons, powerful abilities and the attention of Headmaster Cauldren, who promises to turn him into one of the greatest leaders the kingdom has ever known.For the first time, Elian feels talented, admired and important.Then he begins seeing memories hidden inside the abilities he borrows.One vision leads him beyond the Institute’s walls, where he meets Mara Senn, a girl who can no longer sing, read, run properly or recognise familiar faces. Every ability she has lost now exists inside Elian.Mara reveals that the Institute’s celebrated donors are not volunteers. Poor families are trapped in contracts they cannot understand, and children with valuable abilities are stripped of their talents before they are old enough to object.As Elian investigates, he uncovers an even darker truth. He was not selected by the Institute because of his potential. He was created by it. His unusual mind was assembled from fragments taken from other children, and even the personality he considers his own may have been carefully constructed.Meanwhile, the more talents Elian borrows, the less certain he becomes of who he truly is. A general’s courage makes him fearless but cruel. A diplomat’s charm makes him persuasive but manipulative. A surgeon’s calmness slowly removes his compassion.When the dying king leaves the kingdom without a suitable successor, Headmaster Cauldren reveals his final plan: fill Elian with the abilities, instincts and memories of history’s greatest rulers, transforming him into a perfect king.Elian must choose between becoming the extraordinary person he has always wanted to be and destroying the system that made him powerful.But returning the stolen talents could cause the kingdom to collapse. Healers may lose their skills, soldiers may forget how to defend the borders and thousands of borrowers may be left without the abilities on which their lives depend.To free the donors, Elian must risk losing every remarkable part of himself—and discover whether anything truly belongs to him beneath all the talents he carries.